It’s an interesting week in ComicList terms. Let’s go right to the pick of the week, shall we?

That would be Moto Hagio’s A Drunken Dream and Other Stories, the first result of the Fantagraphics-Shogakukan team-up that’s being curated by Matt Thorn. It’s a deeply glorious book that brims with Hagio’s psychological and emotional insights. I plan on posting a review on Thursday. You can order a signed copy from the publisher.

If that doesn’t slake your appetite for classic manga, Vertical is kind enough to offer Osamu Tezuka’s Apollo’s Song in two paperback volumes. It’s an example of deeply crazy Tezuka, with the added bonus of lots and lots of sex. If you can resist that description, you’re stronger than I am.

One of last year’s big books is now available in paperback. David Small’s Stitches (W.W. Norton) offers a beautifully rendered and stunningly bleak look at a miserable childhood. It’s a really great graphic novel.

There are also new issues of three very different and very entertaining pamphlet comics. First is the second issue of Avengers: The Children’s Crusade, following the Young Avengers as they search for the Scarlet Witch to the dismay of most of the rest of the residents of the Marvel universe, who seem happy to assume that the longtime heroine is evil and crazy. Next is the penultimate (I think) issue of Brandon Graham’s King City from Image, whose website is so terrible that I won’t even bother trying to find a link to additional information on the comic. And last is the fourth issue of Stumptown, a smart tale of a down-on-her-luck private investigator from Oni.

What looks good to you?

Updated: I forgot one big pamphlet offering, the arrival of Veronica 202 (Archie Comics) and Riverdale’s first openly gay resident, Kevin Keller. I hope I can find a copy so I can be appropriately derisive when conservative groups condemn the comic.

Before we get to that, I feel I should note that Del Rey manga is still launching new series. Its latest is Ema Toyama’s I Am Here! It’s about a young girl who overcomes her shyness through blogging. I fell asleep halfway through typing that sentence, but there you have it. It originally ran in Kodansha’s Nakayoshi magazine. (Page 267.)

It seems like it’s been forever since the gorgeous hardcover collection of the first set of Linda Medley’sCastle Waiting stories. Fantagraphics will release 384 more pages of charming comics about the family-of-choice residents of a falling-down castle along the way. (Page 278.)

Ever since I read Glacial Period (NBM), I’ve wanted someone to publish more comics by Nicolas De Crecy. NBM obliges again with the first volume of Salvatore: Transports of Love about a successful auto mechanic who happens to be a dog. Congratulations, NBM, on joining the elite circle of publishers who have fulfilled one of my license requests. You may join Vertical and Fantagraphics in the Silver Courtesy Lounge. (Page 290.)

I’m generally not the target audience for books from PictureBox, but I love Renée (The Ticking) French, so I’ll be all over H Day. It’s a no-doubt surreal look at how French copes with migraine headaches. (Page 300.)

It also feels like it’s been a long time since Top Shelf published the first volume of Lars Martinson’s Tōnoharu. The second volume examining the life of a North American English teacher in rural Japan can be found listed on page 310.

Bless Yen Press for digging and finding unlicensed Fumi Yoshinaga, specifically Not Love but Delicious Foods, about a hard-working, hard-eating lady and her foodie friends as they restaurant hop through Tokyo. It originally ran in Ohta Shuppan’s Manga Erotics F, which is one of those magazines that seems to run whatever the hell kind of comics it pleases. (Page 321.)

Since we’re sort of on the subject of women who make comics for seinen magazines, it seems like a good (if belated) time to bring up Fuyumi Soryo. Actually, it’s never a bad time to bring up Soryo, given the fact that she has excellent work available in English. There’s Mars, a shôjo title published by Tokyopop that originally ran in Kodansha’s Betsufure, and ES: Eternal Sabbath, a seinen series published by Del Rey that originally ran in Kodansha’s Weekly Morning.

Waiting in the wings, and still running in Kodansha’s Weekly Morning, is Cesare, which looks into that most fascinating family of Renaissance schemers, the Borgias. You may already be familiar with another manga rendering of this clan in the form of You Higuri’s Cantarella (Go! Comi). That’s sort of a sparkly, bishie-quasi-vampire-angel take on the family, full of sold souls and unsettling bisexual longings, and it’s awesome, but the Borgias are weird enough to invite multiple interpretations.

People who have read Cesare compare it favorably to Vinland Saga and Historie, which is high praise indeed, since both of those series are supposed to be incredible. I’ve also seen praise for the depth of historical research Soryo has undertaken in creating the series, and it’s a fascinating period, so it will probably reward readers in that regard. Here’s the link to Kodansha’s page on Cesare.

For some reason, it came to mind that some of my very favorite Japanese comics were made by women for a male audience, in that they ran in seinen anthologies. I don’t know precisely what that means, and most of them were serialized in magazines that I suspect have more of a mixed audience than is average, but I’m feeling lazy, so I thought I’d turn the observation into a poll.

I’ll tell you right now that I have the feeling that I’m going to forget something critical in this installment of the Seinen Alphabet, so feel free to amend in the comments. The “F” entry for the the Shôjo-Sunjeong Alphabet was crazy huge, but Seinen? Well, “F” is for…

Fan service… but fan service isn’t unique to seinen, obviously. Every category features ways its creators can cater to their audience.

Tokyopop has published a couple of seinen manga that starts with “F.”

Futari Ecchi, written and illustrated by Katsu Aki, was published in English as Manga Sutra, and golly, did I find the first volume to be boring.

There’s apparently a seinen version of Fist of the North Star that has yet to be published in English. It was serialized in Shogakukan’s Big Comic Superior. And there’s another seinen version running in Shinchosa’s Comic Bunch.

It’s a mercifully light ComicList this week, which will give me a chance to catch up on the past few weeks of releases.

In fact, there’s a total of one new title on my “to buy” list, and it’s the second volume of Konami Kanata’s Chi’s Sweet Home from Vertical. It’s about a lost kitten adapting to life with her new family, and it’s very cute in a slice-of-life kind of way. It originally ran in Kodansha’s Weekly Morning, and it’s been flipped and colored for publication in English, with the cooperation of the creator. You can watch the equally cute anime on Crunchyroll.

We’ve reached a great letter in the seinen alphabet, at least in terms of licensed manga. “E” is for…

We’ll start with Eden: It’s an Endless World!(Dark Horse), written and illustrated by Hiroki Endo, which is a dense and violent science fiction tale of the world after a pernicious outbreak. The human population has been decimated and is trying to rebuild itself while military and corporate forces scheme in the background. It’s great stuff, if not wildly commercially successful, which is too bad. It originally ran in Kodansha’s Afternoon.

Endo’s two-volume Tanpenshu, collecting varied short stories, has also been published by Dark Horse. These stories also first appeared in Afternoon.

Some people find it difficult to believe that Kaoru Mori’s lovely Emma (CMX) originally ran in a seinen magazine (Enterbrain’s near-perfect Comic Beam), but it did. It’s a glorious tale of a Victorian maid and her romance with a young man from the emerging upper middle class. Roughly 1,000 bloggers wrote about it in this installment of the Manga Moveable Feast.

Fuyumi Soryo may be more well known for her shôjo work, but she has at least one brilliant seinen series available in English: ES: Eternal Sabbath (Del Rey). It’s about powerful psychic clones trying to figure out where they fit in human society with sometimes violent and disturbing results. Kate (The Manga Critic) Dacey wrote about it in this piece on “The Best Manga You’re Not Reading.”ES originally ran in Kodansha’s Weekly Morning.

Ask any random group of manga diehards what series they’d like to see rescued from publishing limbo, and you’re likely to hear a lot of them answer Even a Monkey Can Draw Manga, a delightfully blistering industry satire from Koji Aihara and Kentaro Takekuma. Viz published one volume of it, and the second and third volumes still lurk out there, teasing us all. It was originally serialized in Shogakukan’s Big Comic Spirits.

I’ll confess to only a passing familiarity with Rikdo Koshi’s Excel Saga (Viz), which is serialized in Shonen Gahosha’s Young King OURs. Please feel free to jump in the comments and try and convince me that I should expand my knowledge of this series.

Many of my license requests come from Kodansha’s seinen magazines, but I don’t recall asking for much from Evening yet. I think Masayuki Ishakawa’s Moyasimon (Del Rey) was picked up before I started the feature. Still, Endo has another series from Evening called All Rounder Meguru that might be promising. It’s about mixed martial arts. Here’s Evening’s Japanese site.